too far and too cold, my darling
by Miss Arya Silvertongue
Summary: Winterfell will always be a strange land for someone who has far too much desert and flames in the blood running through her veins. As she keeps vigil for the one thing binding her to the North, Daenerys turns to dreams to find a girl who refuses to wake up. (Gospel of the North series Part 3)


She is polishing steel, practiced strokes smooth and sure and every bit as captivating as every thing she does. Under her red tree, in the middle of her gods' woods, Arya Stark looks beautiful and dangerous. She looks like a dream.

It makes Dany wonder if her childhood fantasies of gallant knights and dashing sellswords had only been bracing her for dark-haired warriors from foreign lands.

It makes her remember Ser Willem's words, warning her about their fondness for breaking poor maidens' hearts.

"Hey."

Arya looks up from her blade, and graces Dany with a warm smile.

"I didn't expect you to find me here."

Despite the thundering in her chest, despite the biting chill, Dany can't help but raise an eyebrow. Anyone who knows her true would know to look for Arya where the silence and the cold are as intimate as lovers. Locked in an embrace that leaves you unable to tell where one ends and the other begins.

"Right," Arya amends, a slight color to her pale cheeks that fascinates and angers Dany in equal measure. "I suppose it's a good place as any."

Dany crosses the last few steps that separate them and sits on the fallen log, barely an arm's length away.

"Are you real?"

Like a snowflake melting from the heat of a furnace, the light in Arya's face vanishes, and her grey eyes turn somber. Before Dany can take her words back, Arya turns away and picks up her whetstone.

"Does it matter?" she answers. Her hair, longer and darker than ever, falls like a curtain that keeps anyone from seeing whatever expression is on her face. "I'm here, aren't I?"

It matters, Dany doesn't tell her. It's the only one that does, these days.

Instead, she watches the work of stone against steel, watches until Needle gleams.

"Do you remember our fight?" Dany blinks against the sudden breeze. The words are spoken as though it's a normal day for the both of them. Like they did not just discuss the merit of wishful thinking a moment ago.

"Which one?"

Dany feels a little indignant when she hears a snort. It's a valid question; for the first half of their knowing each other, all they ever seem to do was fight. They must've made their ancestors very proud.

Arya abandons her sword and places both her hands on her lap, like the proper lady Dany knows she isn't. "The last."

Flashes of memory invade Dany's mind, and she briefly recalls Missandei's disapproving face. It was the only fight where her friend had been firmly on Arya's side.

"The one Missandei didn't like," the other woman adds, as though Dany just spoke her thoughts out loud. It's the smallest of confirmations, and it makes her sigh.

She decides to ignore it for now. "Will you always hold that against me?"

Arya doesn't hesitate with her nod. "Yes. You lied to me."

It really is an old argument, one they've had far before it mattered enough to make sense. It seems she might not have been as over it as she led herself to believe, if the Arya before her insists on talking about it now. What started out as opposing principles gradually became a matter of opposing needs. Dany needed her to live, but what Arya needed was something she couldn't give her. Not then, and certainly not now.

"But I was right," Dany tells her.

It takes a long moment, with Arya staring into nothingness and sitting so still she looks like she's barely breathing, before Dany hears a response.

"In a manner of speaking."

It's such an Arya answer that Dany's heart aches for all that it means, that this is still just as close to real as she can make it.

"Was I, really? Right?" Her fingers tremble from the cold, and from holding them against the urge to touch. "Did I really let you run to your death?"

Arya shrugs, a little less gracefully than if she did it herself, out there. "I'm here, aren't I?"

Dany feels her anger return. "And what does that mean?"

When grey turns to her this time, Dany's breath catches. She's almost forgotten what that feels like, meeting Arya's steady and knowing gaze.

"You're here, Dany. What does that tell you?"

Dany lets out a loud breath, half frustration and all defeat. "I don't understand."

But she does. She really, truly does.

Arya shakes her head, gentle. Always gentle, even in the middle of a battlefield. Even when she's saying goodbye.

"You're in here, looking for me in the one place you know I'm not." With a grace Dany could never have thought she'd manage with just her memories, Arya takes her arm. They both stare at their hands, Arya's paler fingers caressing the scars on her knuckles. There is one, just below Dany's right thumb, that matches a mark on Arya's own. "While everyone is out there, finding answers, you're in here. What does that tell you?"

The Arya Stark of the waking world would never have repeated any question. Patience had been a skill she learned against her will, she once told Dany.

"You're here because you've already given up on me out there, Dany."

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That night, Daenerys wakes up shivering.

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"You always take me to the coldest places."

The woman standing at the edge of the walkway is donning a cloak of blue and silver, hair styled in a single braid that falls to the small of her back. When she spins to face Dany, her face lights up.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that."

Dany follows the other woman's eyes, and finds herself wearing one of the gowns she wore when she ruled Meereen. It's also the color of the sky, a shade darker than the new Stark banner but close enough that it almost feels like a brand.

Dany realizes a moment later that she doesn't mind it at all.

"It's warm."

They're standing atop hundreds of feet of solid ice, but Dany feels as though she's back in—

"I know this dress." She runs a hand over the familiar patterns, and looks up to meet Arya's twinkling eyes. "I was wearing this that day. In the fighting pits."

Dany remembers how the cloth had clung to her skin, and how not even an entire pitcher of water could quench the thirst that made her throat as dry as the Red Waste. She'd thought she was going to die from the heat, before a sudden tendril of frost climbed up her spine when she spotted a pair of haunting eyes from one of the faces in the arena. A face with lighter brows, and stronger jawline. The first face.

"You were," said Arya, her smile indulgent just like every time she knows something Dany has yet to grasp.

And just like every time she feels at a loss, Dany grapples to regain control.

"Why did you take me here?"

Arya shrugs, and turns back to the horizon. Dany refuses to take the bait, and soldiers on.

"If we stood here the first time, I wouldn't have had to guess if I was going mad or not."

Of course she wouldn't, because out there, beyond her bed and her room, the Wall is nothing but a graveyard of ice and death.

"What am I doing here, Arya?"

Dany places herself next to the other woman, lets her gaze settle on the endless stretch of snow. She wills herself to see the beauty of the North, beyond the cold and the dump and the history. She wants to understand why Arya loves this place, why she could see the rest of the realm and beyond, but still choose to return. Choose it to be her final resting place.

"Are you going back to King's Landing?" Arya's voice is soft, almost wistful.

This time, it's Dany who shrugs. "I don't know yet."

Arya nods, though at what, Dany can't tell. "Are you leaving me?"

It takes a moment for the words to settle amidst the flare that stoked Dany's ire.

"You can't be serious," Dany spits, suddenly so mad she doesn't know what to do with herself. "You have no right to ask me that."

Arya's delicate face remains calm, and Dany wonders just where that comes from. It's certainly not from her.

"It's the right choice. The south needs you."

"Does it now," Dany hears herself saying. "And you don't, right? Because you're dead?"

She rushes through the words, tongue burning in the haste to get them out. It's the first time she's breathed life to those thoughts, and she hates Arya for making her do it.

"You know very well there wouldn't be any leaving happening if you'd only _listened_ to me, Arya. I _told_ you not to come here."

Dany begged her, that night. Almost went down on her knees as she pleaded with Arya not to go to the North. She knew, the moment they stepped into the ship that took them across the Narrow Sea, that returning Arya to Westeros meant giving her back to her home and her men. But Dany could not bear to lose her, knew that allowing her to ride for Winterfell would mean her fall.

Arya left anyway, and Arya fell.

"Don't let Arianne Martell scare you. You know more about ruling than she does, anyway." Grey eyes hold Dany's gaze, and she wants so badly to weep at how _right_ it feels, to stand in front of her and talk about the future of their kingdoms. Dany wonders if she loved these moments so much, that this one feels almost real.

When Arya takes her hand, Dany realizes that she's trembling. But she still doesn't feel the least bit cold.

"I'm proud of you," Arya whispers, the same words she told her when they saw each other amid the ruins of the Red Keep. "I will always be proud of you."

Dany feels a hand on her cheek, and she closes her eyes as she leans toward it.

"Come back to me," she whispers to the darkness. "Please don't become one of my ghosts."

When she opens her eyes, she sees that Arya's smile has turned soft and sad.

"You've already made me one, Your Grace."

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When Dany opens her eyes to another abyss, she is greeted by the winter chill. It's the cold that reminds her of what's real these days; winter is her life now.

She holds her breath as the memory of Arya's face threatens to fade with every heartbeat. She ties it to the closest thought she can find, to a portrait from one of Winterfell's libraries. It was an image of another Stark lady who died at the end of a great war. She, too, wore her House's cloak, and had her dark hair in a single, intricate braid.

It was an exquisite portrait, and when Dany had stood closer to admire the detail, she'd found three letters stitched into a place at the corner near the frame. Letters that had told her everything she needed to know.

_Lya_.

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"Dany?"

With much difficulty, Dany tears her gaze from the bed and watches the phantom by the window.

"I just wanted to say goodbye."

Arya acknowledges her answer with a nod, before turning back to whatever it is she is seeing under the moonlight. Dany wonders if it's her own yearning that made it so, her own pleas to the night to give her back what it took so shamelessly.

Tonight is her last chance. She may never come to call the North home, but Dany knows, deep inside her, that it will always be Arya's.

"I'm sorry. For lying to you."

She can still remember the broken look on Arya's face, when she'd learned that Dany had been sending her everywhere but the place she'd wanted to come back to. She'd told her to wait, that the war against flesh and blood had to be won before the one against ice and magic. She'd left like the worst kind of monster, keeping her from the one place Dany herself had been searching for her entire life. Home.

It was the last time they spoke.

A moment later, Arya leaves her post to sit at the foot of the bed.

"Will you tell her that?"

Dany closes her eyes, and takes a deep breath.

"Will I get another chance?" she hears herself whisper. "Will there be something for me to return to, Arya?"

Arya's smile is gentle, and familiar.

"If you believe in it."

Dany nods and rises from her seat. As she reaches the bed, she pauses for a breath. When she finds the courage, she bends to brush her lips against the forehead of the sleeping woman on the bed.

"Wait for me," she whispers, before leaving the room.

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The next night, on her way South, Dany still dreams. But this time, she finds no grey-eyed phantoms.

* * *

**Gospel of the North **series

(Part 1) a castle in the snow

(Part 2) Little Blue Rose

(Part 3) too far and too cold, my darling

(Part 4) Hour of the Wolf


End file.
